Tag Archives: paul mccartney

My current project is the second part of a screenplay trilogy focusing on a college student, Davis who, in this deleted scene argues, badly with his university radio station colleagues:

Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die plays in the background over the lounge speakers in the radio station.

LAURA: Ellen’s show is called Synesthesia. You know what that is? (To ELLEN) Kandinsky painted music, right? Different senses coming together. You should open your show with something like that.

ELLEN nods earnestly.

DAVIS: I wrote this play in second year.

ELLEN: A play?

DAVIS: Well, it was more like a philosophy paper. ELLEN: About Kandinsky?

DAVIS: Nietzsche’s Ubbermesh.

ARTHUR: It’s Uber-mench. Uber. Use the ‘U’. And mench, like bench.

DAVIS (Trying to ignore ARTHUR): There was this painting in it, Garicault’s Raft of the Medusa.

ARTHUR: Christ, Davis, do you know any words? (Gesticulating to LAURA like a frustrated clown) It’s Gericault. The ‘g’ is soft. Repeat after me: Gericault. LAURA: I have a question for you, Davis.

DAVIS: I can hardly wait.

LAURA: What are you going to do about the dead air?

DAVIS: What dead…?

DAVIS looks up and wheels around, suddenly realizing that Live and Let Die, the song on his radio show, is about to end. He sprints around the corner, slides into a filing cabinet and bangs into the door, only realizing now that it is locked. The song ends.

She opened the book and considered the page. She had forgotten where she was, what paragraph, what had happened. She let her hand drift down the worn paper, dragging the bookmark in a long slow slide. She bent the bookmark forward and looked down the glossy edge, an old ticket, from the McCartney concert at Yankees Stadium. They had sat at the side of the stage, seeing McCartney’s profile as he moved back and forth. It was amazing how young he acted and all of those great songs. And Crystal had almost looked happy, relaxed in the evening light, the arc of the thousands of people going up gently away into the sky. She didn’t drink that night. Nothing. That was the year she had died.She turned the ticket over, slid it back into the book, and held her finger, the black nail polish poking out, the end of it. She hung on to that and stared at her shoes and then across the train at her dark reflection in the window, the tunnel moving past, and saw the man staring back, his expression almost angry, chin burrowed in his scarf. Sex. It was always that. The train slowed. It was time to get off.

A tantalizing contradiction seems to exist in the sex symbols of the 1960s, a sexuality that simultaneously offers lust and innocence. Paul McCartney used this iconography on the Out There tour as a stage backdrop for his performance of Paperback Writer.